1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to a requisition and catalog system. More particularly, it relates to a leveraged procurement network (LPN) system for leveraging purchasing across company and company groups.
2. Background Art
Previously, an enterprise company provided procurement services to a customer company. The back end system for supporting these procurement services is bridged to a front end requisition and catalog system (Req/Cat Web, or RCW server) with which users from the customer company would interface to view a catalog of commodities and/or services and enter requisition requests.
When the enterprise company provides such procurement services to more than one customer company, it has heretofore been required to rewrite the front end system to accommodate the accounting rules required to support the procurement activities of each additional company. This is time consuming and complex. There is, therefore, a need in the art to provide a system and method whereby an enterprise may provide procurement services to a plurality of customer companies using the same front end requisition and catalog system for them all.
However, the data and accounting for one customer company must be isolated from viewing or use by other customer companies.
The Internet provides exchange mechanisms where suppliers bring goods and services to be offered and malls for shoppers to obtain them. These exchange mechanisms are largely independent with a single company selling and an individual from another company shopping. Generally, if companies wish to partner to gain advantage either from consolidating purchase volumes to obtain better prices or from creating a complete palette of business goods and services to establish a ‘one stop shop’, many individual relations are established and managed independently. Manual integration of systems to ensure members rights and responsibilities are met increase the bureaucracy and paperwork. Should a company endeavor to participate or host multiple trading networks, the membership management becomes very difficult.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for a system and method whereby an enterprise may leverage purchases by a plurality of customer companies for which it is providing procurement services against a common contract having volume specific terms and conditions.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved system and method for procuring goods and services on behalf of customer companies.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for leveraging purchases of goods and services against the same volume specific contract by a plurality of unrelated customer companies.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for providing procurement services to a plurality of companies organized according to groups of related companies sharing access to selected resources across company groups and access to other resources only within company groups.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for leveraging purchasing across company groups while isolating information to individual company groups.